Ev Williams’ content creation platform Medium has made its first acquisition: Matter, the Kickstarter-backed science and technology journalism startup cofounded by former GigaOM reporter Bobbie Johnson last year.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is stepping away from the site’s day-to-day operations. While many folks in the industry have seen this coming for months, the news has still raised eyebrows. But Stone is not the first person to step away from a company he helped start.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone caused a stir when he mused during an interview about the company helping to create a “Twitter News Service” for major news organizations. But the reality is that Twitter is already a distributed news network — it just needs better filters.

Author Malcolm Gladwell argued in a recent piece for New Yorker magazine that the influence of Twitter and other social-media tools on social activism has been over-stated, but as Twitter co-founder Biz Stone notes in an essay of his own, this argument has some serious flaws.

Twitter and solar may seem like strange bedfellows, but they both want something very badly: to convince the public that it can’t do with them. That was the gist of Twitter exec Biz Stone’s message at the stage at a solar conference in LA on Tuesday.

“Laughable,” “absurd,” “ludicrous” and “pointless” were words Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone used Monday night to describe a recent Malcolm Gladwell story in the New Yorker about the futility of social media to create real social change.